


Scorpion Sting, I Don't Wanna Bleed (Tell Me That I'm Not Lost)

by crispyjenkins



Series: Crispy Writes [10]
Category: Star Wars Legends: Jango Fett Open Seasons (Comics), Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: (implied) - Freeform, Again, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Canonical Character Death, Force Sensitive Hondo Ohnaka, Gen, Mandalorian Gods fucking with Jaster, Mando'a, Not A Fix-It, Parental Hondo Ohnaka, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, but a Happy Ending Anyways, hondo ohnaka has been terroising house mereel for three generations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-20
Updated: 2021-01-20
Packaged: 2021-03-18 16:27:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28870041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crispyjenkins/pseuds/crispyjenkins
Summary: Rubbing his eye until he sees stars, Jaster stares down into the bottle until he can come up with a way to explain core Mandalorian beliefs to a child that had barely a decade of living as one before that, too, had been taken from him. “If Jang’ika took that job intending to come out on the other side, I’ll kiss whatever Vizsla is left.”Boba’s mouth twists and he kicks his heels against the floor, not waiting for Jaster to hand it to him to grab thetihaarback.“Buirwas an idiot,” he says, like the solve to a simple math problem, and Jaster can’t but agree.He sighs. “Unfortunately, he probably got that from somewhere."jaster dies on korda 6 and is kicked almost fourty years into the future: the fic
Relationships: Jango Fett & the Clones, Jaster Mereel & Boba Fett, Jaster Mereel & Jango Fett
Series: Crispy Writes [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960120
Comments: 7
Kudos: 197





	Scorpion Sting, I Don't Wanna Bleed (Tell Me That I'm Not Lost)

**Author's Note:**

> **Mando’a:**  
>  _Ka'ra_ — an ancient Mandalorian story, ruling council of fallen kings, “stars”  
>  _ad_ — “child”, gender neutral  
>  _'ika_ — diminutive suffix, similar to the suffix “ita/o” in Spanish. generally used only by close family and friends  
>  _beskar'gam —_ Armour made of _beskar,_ “Mandalorian Iron” that was actually probably a steel alloy  
>  _evaar'gam_ — lit. “youth armour”, fan name for the interim armour/garb Mandalorians would have worn before building their kit of beskar’gam  
>  _buir_ — “parent”, gender neutral  
>  _Cuy'val Dar_ — “Those who no longer exist”, group of 75 Mando’ade and 25 others put together by Jango to train the clones  
>  _aliit_ — “clan”, “family”  
>  _tihaar_ — Mandalorian strong clear spirit made from fruit  
>  _shabuir —_ an extreme insult, mostly accepted in fandom to be an insult of an individual’s ability to parent (from _buir_ ), which is an intrinsic part of Mandalorian psyche and identity  
>  _laandur_ — used here as “weakling”, “pathetic”, but is usually used as “delicate”, “fragile”  
> *in reference to the Mando’a word for the dead/deceased _“taab'echaaj'la”,_ or “marched far away”, best explained in the Mando’a tribute to dead comrades, “not gone, merely marching far away”.

_“Oh, Jango? We keep him here.” –Lama Su, AotC_

By some will of the _Ka’ra,_ it’s Boba that finds _him._

The possibility of dying in his _ad’s_ arms hadn’t exactly crossed Jaster’s mind until it happened, like a nightmare he had never even had. For the first time since the Fett farm burned, Jaster cursed the _Ka’ra,_ and he _curses them again_ when he wakes up not marching* to the stars, but standing knee-deep in the snows of Galidraan

And the _Ka’ra_ make sure he knows it’s Galidraan though he had never been there, just as he somehow knows Jango is long-since dead. That he is a dislocated bone in the universe, snapped out of time and place and thrown into a future where Jango’s face stares at him from a body that is not his.

“Oh,” the teen with Jango’s nose says, the snow coming all the way up to their thighs, and they don’t look dressed nearly warm enough for this biome. “Did Hondo send you?”

Jaster blinks at them. “Did…? No, _ad’ika,_ I have not spoken to Hondo in many years.” Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised Hondo is even still alive, Maker knows Jaster’s tried to kill him enough times himself, but if the number of years since his death on Korda Six is as many as he thinks it is, surely someone would have shot him by now.

The teen doesn’t wear _beskar’gam_ —it’s unlikely they’re even old enough to— but the style of the armor they do wear cannot be inspired by anything else, just reminiscent enough of _evaar’gam_ that Jaster can’t help comparing every little detail about them with the faded image of Jango in his mind.

“Then who the kriff are you?” They eye Jaster warily, left hand twitching towards the vibroblade at their hip.

Promising to strangle every one of the _Ka’ra_ when he can finally march away, and throwing the last of his caution down to the snow between them, Jaster simply says, “Jaster Mereel.”

Impossibly, though maybe not entirely, not-Jango doesn’t laugh at him, or call him crazy, or even try to shoot him with the rifle slung over their shoulder. No, they straighten to their full height, and—

And swear so colorfully in Huttese that Jaster knows this hell-child has _absolutely_ been raised by Hondo Ohnaka.

Boba takes him to the ruins of Kamino first, where the kriffing _Sith Empire_ has destroyed another one of his people’s homes. 

The growth labs were all blown into the ocean by imperial ilk soon after the formation of the empire, but the barracks and some of the training rooms still stand above the waves. In the ship he says belonged to Jango, Boba steers them to a dilapidated landing pad, controlling the Slave I (Maker, had Jaster really left Jango to that fate?) far too easily through the rubble for this to be his first time to return, and Jaster tries not to think about what that means.

Walking the dark, grimy white halls, seeing the narrow bunks and bare req rooms, he then tries not to think about a child being raised in such a place, about _hundreds of thousands of_ children being raised in such a place. How had Jango… _chosen_ this for them?

“I only have his stories,” Boba tells him quietly, when he shows Jaster the tiny apartment the Kaminoans had given them to “keep Jango close”. It’s bigger than most captain’s cabins, to be sure, but it is just as plain and white as the rest of the facility. “But he couldn’t even get one hundred Mandalorians to come and train the… clones.” He shuffles his feet uncomfortably as Jaster looks into the cupboard-sized kitchen and tries not to break down at the package of Mandalorian chiles rotted away on the counter. “Everyone else was New Mandalorian or Death Watch.”

“And the rest… they fell at the Battle of Galidraan?”

 _“Buir_ always called it a massacre,” he looks away. “Only a handful of the _Cuy’val Dar_ even considered themselves True Mandalorians, _buir_ was there when the Jedi killed the rest.”

Jaster inhales deeply, takes a few moments to steady himself, and is sickeningly, horrifyingly _relieved._ By the Maker, but knowing Jango had had no one left before his Kamino contract, that not even Skirata followed the codex anymore, that Jango had only taken the job after forcing Tyranus to give him an unaltered clone, makes Jaster guilty for having doubted his foundling. It doesn’t excuse anything, of course, but knowing Jango had done it all for _aliit,_ well, it does make it easier to swallow.

Boba leads him back out of the apartment, he had already stripped it of anything important years ago, and they don’t stick around after reboarding the Slave I. Only after they’re out of atmosphere with hyperspace coordinates for Tatooine in the astronav system does Boba join Jaster in the tiny galley with a bottle of _tihaar_ that Jaster should probably reprimand him for, but won’t.

“He tried to pretend he didn’t care, about the others,” Boba says and doesn’t even bother to find them glasses, “I think some days he even believed it.”

“He always was stubborn as a rancor.”

Boba takes a long pull from the bottle before passing it across the table. “Tyranus scared the shit out of me back then, he was too… put together, too fancy. _Buir_ didn’t like him, I don’t know why he even did the tryout for him, the pay wasn’t even that great?”

Rubbing his left eye until he sees stars, Jaster stares down into the bottle until he can come up with a way to explain core Mandalorian beliefs to a child that had barely a decade of living as one before that, too, had been taken from him. “If Jang’ika took that job intending to come out on the other side, I’ll kiss whatever Vizsla is left.”

Boba’s mouth twists and he kicks his heels against the floor, not waiting for Jaster to hand it to him to grab the _tihaar_ back. _“Bui_ r was an idiot,” he says, like the solve to a simple math problem, and Jaster can’t but agree.

He sighs. “Unfortunately, he probably got that from somewhere.”

“I mean, at least Montross didn’t live long enough to end up as the template? Kriffing _fuck,_ can you imagine if the Jedi had had to work with that _shabuir’s_ clones?”

“Maybe the war would have ended sooner,” he muses and accepts the bottle, “surely this Emperor would have tired of his face much sooner than Jango’s.”

“Or the Coruscant Guard would have shivved Palpatine in his sleep and tried to take over the Republic; what’s one betrayal of your leader to another?”

“Then I’d like to think Jango would put him, them, in their place for a third time.”

Snorting, Boba pushes to his feet to, presumably, check on the autopilot. “If _buir_ would have even let it get that far, then _I’ll_ kiss Vizsla.”

“Old friend!” Hondo shouts as soon as he sees them, and Jaster winces, nursing his first hangover since his twenties.

“Ohnaka,” he returns, and pretends he doesn’t notice the subtle way Boba brightens as Hondo comes to clap them both on the shoulders.

The old pirate just chuckles and starts to steer them both back across the hangar bay to his latest junk ship. “I heard you died, Mand’alor,” he says casually, like the title isn’t cursed to the _ka’ra_ and back, like it hadn’t been three decades since anyone had dared call someone from his house such a thing so _sincerely._

“I did.”

“I found him on Galidraan,” Boba offers. “Is that why you told me to go?”

Hondo scoffs, and Jaster would say he was flustered if he didn’t know him better. “No, I told you to go because Aurra had a job for you, that you seem to have forgotten about in your haste to bring my long lost best friend back to me.”

Boba scowls. “Aurra wasn’t at the meeting place, _laandur,_ it was a kriffing mynock chase and you know it.”

Jaster side eyes his old “friend”, and wonders again about his preternatural… luck in all things pirate-related, despite being a boisterous mess of a man most of the time. If this Aurra had even been on the planet when Boba got there, Jaster will kiss Vizsla _twice._

**Author's Note:**

> a prompt fill for an anon on my tumblr @/crispyjenkins! original prompt: Can we get a fic where Jaster somehow gets sent to the future or something and him reacting to the clones? (Being pissed off that his ad would do something like this to these poor kids/ just reacting to them?)
> 
> i also wrote this with [this post](https://crispyjenkins.tumblr.com/private/638778323429949440/tumblr_qku8dz5KI81ufk7lq) in mind, which is currently my favorite take on jango
> 
> _i’ve already had a few people donate to my ko-fi and i’m completely floored by your kindness and generosity, and i sat down with this fill knowing i wanted to get it out as soon as possible. i sincerely love you all, i hope you’re all healthy and being as safe as possible.)_
> 
> title from [oh raven (sing me a happy song)](https://open.spotify.com/track/5tmVzNSHuDcIcMmhmkTA8C?si=j2-U4auZRLSOInGGd4ZVYw) by unlike pluto


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